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On September 20 Adela wrote to her Don Alfredo, addressing him by the affectionate title she had not used for some time in her letters. I am sure you will be sorry to hear I have lost my good Pablo. I can hardly bear to think of or realize it yet, but you will sympathize. You know I left him at Mrs. James’ to go to Vera Cruz by the next steamer, + I supposed he did, or she would have let me know. But he has never been heard of since. I had been anxious about not hearing , but so often letters had miscarried that I hoped all was well, till a letter from his wife came yesterday. I cannot guess why she did not write in July, when she must have seen by my letters that I supposed he was at home. He was to have telegraphed to her from V. [Vera] Cruz to send to meet him at Patzcuaro, but did not. So I suppose he must have developed a fever on the steamer + perhaps been taken to the hospital + died without having time to give his address. He had no strength to resist an illness. Oh Chichen! How much it has cost me. (AB to Tozzer, Sept. 20, 1904, PM) Adela was devastated. Pablo was often unwell and not physically strong, and she told Tozzer that she had never expected him to live very long. She felt deeply for his wife, “waiting from day to day all this time, hoping for him” (ibid.). She was convinced that Chichén was unlucky, and added to her warning, “I did think I might escape, as I was not digging up graves or hidden things” (ibid.). The fact that Pablo’s death occurred so soon after the deaths in Harry’s family made it all the more shocking to Adela. She could not shake a sense of bad fate with the three deaths—Harry’s wife and daughter and now Pablo—happening within three years. And, as stricken as she was by Pablo’s death, she realized that it would change her life. “I shall be like a violinist who has lost the one instrument he can play on. You have no idea what a help he was to me in every way. I 123 ______________________________________ Chapter Eighteen The Passing of Pablo I warn you against having anything to do with the ruins. Everyone who has, has been unlucky. —Adela Breton to Alfred Tozzer, September ,  124 Chapter Eighteen ______________________________________ should never have done anything without him . . .” (ibid.). Pablo had made possible her travels and wanderings. He had introduced her to the cultures of west Mexico, had collected for her, and had arranged for her to visit sites where tourists never went. And at Chichén he had seen to the details of living there, enabling her to do her work with a minimum of distractions. Not surprisingly Adela became ill, but she continued to do her work. She and Harry went to Oxford, where Adela studied the Codices in the Bodleian Library and particularly the Kingsborough copies. Harry left after a week, but Adela stayed on for three weeks, carefully studying and making copies, and noting similarities to details in the frescoes. She told Putnam she was glad she had made her copies of the frescoes before she had closely examined the Codices, as it gave her confidence in her ability to discern details accurately. The frescoes were the subject of much discussion —and correspondence—at this time. The Peabody had requested (or commissioned) Adela to make copies of them in reduced size. She determined that the smallest she could make them was on a quarter scale; if smaller than that, too many details would be lost. This must have been very tedious to do: first she had to make reduced outlines of each one, then trace and color them. She worked to one-thirty-second of an inch but found that quite tiring. The Peabody was interested in having the frescoes published, but of course needed all the copies completed before they could proceed with these plans. By November she was making plans to leave England to escape the damp winter. She was trying to get some details settled with the Bristol Museum about placing her casts with them. These were casts of the carved figures that stood as sentinels to the opening of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars. She wrote the director that the casts were...

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